Simulating X-ray Clusters with Adaptive Mesh Refinement

Gravitational instabilities naturally give rise to multi-scale structure, which is difficult for traditional Eulerian hydrodynamic methods to accurately evolve. This can be circumvented by adaptively adding resolution (in the form of multiple levels of finer meshes) to relatively small volumes as required. We describe an application of this adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) technique to cosmology, focusing on the formation and evolution of X-ray clusters. A set of simulations are performed on a single cluster, varying the initial resolution and refinement criteria. We find that although new, small scale structure continues to appear as the resolution is increased, bulk properties and radial profiles appear to converge at an effective resolution of 8192. We find good agreement with the “universal” dark matter profile of Navarro, Frenk & White (1995).